Primal Rage II
By 1995, Atari had begun production of Primal Rage II. Ken Humphries, senior producer of the home versions of the original Primal Rage, said in an early 1996 interview that "Primal Rage 2 should come out in the arcades in September 1996. As soon as they finish that, we'll start working on the consumer versions." However, the game did not get very far into production before being cancelled, as Atari felt that it wouldn't generate enough sales. The controls were expanded from a four-button to a six-button configuration. The game was to feature all seven gods from the original plus ten newcomers: a new dinosaur, a boss, and eight humans called the Avatars, that were the gods' surrogates on Urth, with the first game's characters meant to make a comeback as said gods. Necrosan, a boss in the form of a living dragon skeleton, once rumored by video game magazine GamePro to be added in an updated release of the original Primal Rage, was to become the main antagonist. The plot focused on the years after the first game's timeline. It turns out the meteor that crashed on Urth was actually an egg which hatched a being known as Necrosan. The gods fight it but their efforts end up being useless. Necrosan imprisons them in a state of semi-suspended animation, forms minions of his own and starts to wreak havoc on Urth. The gods then choose human Avatars for themselves. The Avatars fight the minions of Necrosan, release the gods from their prison and battle Necrosan himself. The warriors would be Malyssa, avatar of Vertigo; Arik, avatar of Sauron; Keena, avatar of Talon; Shank, avatar of Chaos; Sinjin, avatar of Diablo; Kaze, avatar of Blizzard; Tor, avatar of Armadon; and Xiao Ming, avatar of Slash Fang, a newly introduced Primal God in the form of a Smilodon. Although the game never came to be, its story was later adapted into Primal Rage: The Avatars. Also, the characters of Slash Fang and Necrosan were released with the other god characters in the short-lived Primal Rage action figure series. A test arcade cabinet briefly appeared playable at the Golfland arcades in Milpitas, California and Sunnyvale, California, and a supposedly finished machine of this was shown at the California Extreme 2001 show. The machine had the original board and most of the original art. In subsequent years, screenshots of the incomplete game were released on the Internet. In December 2012, a YouTube user posted a video that showcased the almost never-before seen game in action, and then in June 2014, it was reported that the game was available for play at Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois. With only two boards of the game considered to be in existence, a dump from the game's board had been circulating the internet for some years, but no emulator had been able to run it, until in March 2017 it was revealed that an individual had created a modified version of MAME, named "MAME4RAGE2", making it able to emulate the game. References Category:Atari arcade games Category:Cancelled arcade games Category:Dinosaurs in video games Category:Impact event video games Category:Multiplayer and single-player video games Category:Mortal Kombat clones Category:Post-apocalyptic video games Category:Primal Rage Category:Versus fighting games Category:Video games with digitized sprites